For a conventional storage application such as small computer system interface (SCSI), Fibre Channel (FC) or Internet SCSI (iSCSI), a memory management system can manage, for example, a registered memory region in a host memory system. The memory region, which may be exposed to other conventional storage applications (e.g., remote applications), may be characterized by a reference number such as a steering tag (STag), a memory region length and an initial tagged offset (TO) of zero. Conventional storage applications do not use and would not be compatible with systems that use nonzero initial offsets.
The incompatibility of conventional storage applications and their respective memory management systems with applications and memory management systems that do use nonzero initial offsets has created separate and distinct memory management architectures and processes. For example, a host may have a first memory management system with a first memory structure dedicated for conventional storage applications and a first set of algorithms for handling memory management. The host may also have a second memory management system with a second memory structure dedicated for other applications that use nonzero initial offsets and a second set of algorithms for handling memory management. In addition, the memory management system must know the type of application with which the memory management system is dealing.
Further limitations and disadvantages of conventional and traditional approaches will become apparent to one of ordinary skill in the art through comparison of such systems with at least some aspects of the present invention as set forth in the remainder of the present application with reference to the drawings.